CS698A: Selected Areas of Mechanism Design

Outline: This course is based on selected topics in mechanism design and its relationship with areas like algorithms, optimization etc. These topics include cooperative games, stable matching, games on networks, potential games etc. This is a research-oriented course, hence students are expected to read and present cutting-edge research topics in this area, and also develop writing skills towards a formal technical report.

Pre-requisites: Familiarity with formal mathematical reasoning, probability theory, calculus, basics of computational complexity, and familiarity with computer programming. The course expects familiarity with game theoretic ideas and results – hence a course like CS698W or CS656 will be required.

Some papers are suggested on Piazza for the project component of the course. They are indicative, however, you are free to choose project ideas of your own — see the course project section below.

Project proposal submission deadline: February 28 (4 days after the last midterm exam) — submit a one-page summary of the plan you are planning to pursue. You may use the project submission template below.

Project submission template: tex, pdf. Details are available in the pdf — keep your report limited to 10 pages in that format. The deadline for submission of the reports is April 21 (one day before the first day of end-sem exams).

Books & References

No specific textbook. The references and lecture notes of CS698W will be useful for the basics of game theory and mechanism design. Selected chapters from books and lecture notes that may be useful will be made available during the course. However the students may refer to the following books:

Scribing

Here is the template for scribing the lectures. Here and here are good introductions to LaTeX. Please email me the scribed lecture notes within 2 days of the class (first week scribes get one week’s time) — I’ll immediately put them on the course page as ‘draft’. Later when I review the notes, you may need to update the notes and resubmit. Less the update that is needed, better is the credit — so consider to do the first draft carefully.

Course Project

Since this is a research-focused course, the course project is extremely important for developing new ideas and transforming them into workable solutions. It is seen that in doing a project, where a learner is required to either code a system or prove a result independently, s/he learns very intricate details of an idea or concept. A course project can be (a) completely a theoretical development, (b) completely a real-world application development, or (c) a mix of the previous two. All topics has to have a significant game-theoretic/mechanism design component — however there is no restriction on what the application area may be. It is a good idea to keep looking for ideas when different topics are discussed in the class — and if you have an idea that may be converted into a project, come and talk to me. Deadline for submitting the project proposals will be announced later.

Virtual Classroom

This semester we will be using Piazza for class discussion. The system is highly catered to getting you help fast and efficiently from classmates, the TA, and myself. Rather than emailing questions to the teaching staff, I encourage you to post your questions on Piazza.